


god of small things

by clytemnestras



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 16:11:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15538017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: i like dead things, says the landscape. they cannot hurt me.





	god of small things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nereid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nereid/gifts).



> I wouldn't even try to make this fit canon... square peg round hole lol
> 
> for the [ficathon](https://clockwork-hart1.livejournal.com/33943.html)

He says, once, mouth wrapped around the lip of a vodka bottle, "How do I know I didn't make you up?"  
  
Ronan replies, "You're a narcissist. You only make up people who love you."  
  
Joseph repeats the question.  
  
  
*  
  
"I had a dream about killing you," Joseph says, with his hips framing Ronan’s, pinning him in the backseat of a dreamed up car. He carefully draws his fingers down the column of Ronan's throat. “We were here, in this car. In this forest. We were driving so fast our skin could barely hold on and I was laughing whilst you screamed. Eyes closed. Tree coming. Boom.”  
  
  
Ronan smiles, bares his throat further. “I don't scream.” Joseph wants to bite at his throat like an animal. He feels like with every blink of those eyes he understands less and less of his own soul.  
  
Ronan pulls his chin down, the sharpness of his face outlines his skull beneath his skin. “And these trees love me.”  
  
Joseph has a knife somewhere in the door of the car. He could just move his wrist, hold Ronan down, stop the howling in his head.  
  
“In my next dream I’ll make a gun. I’ll name it after you, if you want.” There's no humour in his mouth, or his eyes.  
  
“In my next dream,” Ronan says, flashing his teeth, “I’ll build you a bullet. See who wins.”   
  
*  
  
His lackeys, his shadows, they fold behind him like a swarm, a point of darkness which clashes with Ronan and his band of colour, staring them down on the road.   
  
The one who thinks he leads them - Gansey, makes a shield out his body, leaning on Ronan's shoulder and blocking the path between Joseph and Ronan. They whisper, they speak, they breathe.  
  
The other one, though. The farm boy; quiet, hard-eyed - he's staring at Joseph, from bruised knuckles to bruised eyes. Oh, the boy knows. Joseph can tell that over the gulf of road between them, he is reading Ronan's fingerprints.  
  
That hard gaze is the only thing that keeps him from feeling paper-thin, he is bruised and breathing, alive. As much as he ever is alive. He presses his mouth to his knuckles, then runs the hand through his hair.  
  
“Not tonight,” he says, to Gansey. “But soon.”  
  
*  
  
There are places, in the waking forest, not the sleeping one, where he likes to drive to. To sit alone, to seethe.   
  
He knows this is where Ronan likes to savage himself too. They are two halves, a person and a shadow. He wants to consume the flesh of him until he is the living one.  
  
It is not long before knuckles rap against the window.   
  
He opens the door, and Ronan climbs in beside him, covered in blood and filth.   
  
“You're fucking up my car. I've disappeared people for less.”  
  
Ronan exhales slowly from his nose and pulls a flask from his jacket, drinking deep.  
  
“I just killed myself,” he says. Not  _tried to._  He notes the difference.  
  
“I think I’ve been dead for some time,” Joseph replies, feeling around in his pocket for a lighter. There, that hard line of metal. Silver, cold like the night. He purses his lips as he flicks it on and stretches his left palm over it, letting his cold skin be flooded by the dark heat of fire.  
  
He looks up from the pinking skin, where it starts to sweat, bubbling apart, to Ronan beside him.   
  
“See, don't feel a thing.” He flicks the lighter off, and tilts his head to the side. “Just wanted to see what it’d be like.”  
  
With the damaged hand, throbbing but not burning, he holds out the lighter, never turning away from Ronan's impenetrable eyes.  
  
They both breathe, caught on the same cycle for a hanging moment as they stare and unfurl each other.  
  
Ronan takes the lighter.  
  
Joseph smiles and stretches all the way up his spine. He closes his eyes.  
  
Ronan says, “How do I know I didn't dream you?”  
  
Kavinsky replies, “You would have killed me by now. You only make things you want to destroy.”  
  
Ronan repeats the question.


End file.
